And another case of the internet apparently wielding more influence than it seems to. To much dismay, Samsung announced last week that several of its popular smartphones, most notably the Samsung Galaxy S, would not be getting an upgrade to Ice Cream Sandwich. The internet backlash was palpable, and today, word on the street is that Samsung is reconsidering its position.

Cripes! It’s madness. I had 512 MB of RAM on my PC a decade ago, it was way more than enough then, and you can still comfortably run the latest Firefox on Windows XP in 512 MB of RAM now.

With throwaway hardware comes throwaway software. It sickens me.

To be fair, most of the past software left much to be desired, too... (we just largely don't remember the trash that ~always flooded the place; most of it was ignored by us even back then, justifiably so)

Plus, the last decade was quite peculiar with PCs, we largely got into "good enough" territory - which absolutely wasn't the case just a short few years earlier, so hardware was also sort of throwaway (and software had issues) / changing a bit too rapidly.

Yes, a decade-old PC can do essentially all that a typical "new" PC does, if some basic care is given to the choice of efficient software. Browsing, music, IM, videophone, videos (last two just at lower, but still fine res), basic document editing - no problem, I know, I keep one such machine around. Even video editing could be not much of an issue, if via a small trick of proxy editing (doing it on low resolution version of footage, at the end exporting changes in full), the only major "sacrifice" being recent games (but 1. most people don't play 2. until recently, most new machines would also struggle)

Something analogous a decade ago, even on merely 5 year old (then) PC, would be much harder. Rewind the clock again ...not even another full decade, just half, and it probably gets into impossible. Those were the times when new usage patterns were exploding, undoubtedly also because the then-new hardware finally allowed them.